Thoughts

The Biological Roots of the Self

Note: This post was originally a comment in a Facebook thread, the context of which has been totally lost to me. It was written 2-3 years into the my journey into spiritual doubt. While I don’t remember the Facebook thread that provoked the comment, I do remember the origin of the line of thought. Through casual conversations with my boss at work, I came to realize that almost everything I consider ‘me’ is rooted in genetics and circumstance. ‘American.’ ‘Male.’ ‘White.’ ‘Verbal.’ ‘Analytical.’ ‘Nerdy.’ ‘English-speaking.’ Once my brain and body are stripped away and Earth and all its cultures are left behind, what is left of me that is actually ‘me’? Even if we are resurrected after death as the Bible teaches, what would be left of us that was recognizable? This is another item that as I inhabit the life of faith I have to simply set aside as beyond knowing. (DL, June 13, 2023).


Is there any part of your consciousness that will survive the destruction of your brain?

Pointers to the answer:

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Technology

Why I’m Leaving Facebook

Note: I first made the decision to leave Facebook and migrate my content to this site in 2014. It would be seven years after that decision before I actually got the blog set up in September 2021 and started moving content over. I left Facebook permanently in May 2022. Looking back, I still entirely agree with the rationale below (although I came to like the Messenger app as the best part of Facebook and hardest thing to leave in the end). I have not missed Facebook or the interactions I had there. (DL, June 13, 2023).


After many months of consideration, I have decided to begin the process of disengaging from Facebook.

The primary reason is that I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the way FB manipulates users: curating our news feeds, constantly inserting ads and links to third-party content, giving priority to paid posts, etc. I have ceased to feel like what I see on FB every day is an honest reflection of my friends’ activities and interests; it isn’t. It’s a revenue stream optimized by FB for me to get me clicking on things that aren’t first-and-foremost about my friends, but rather about making FB money.

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Poetry

What is a Star?

What is a star?

The gleam above me in the night?
It isn’t really in the sky.
It is in fact behind my eye,
triggered by a beam of light
that struck a nerve and touched my brain.
A wave of such and such a height
has stroked the synapses of sight—
a process I cannot explain.
But nonetheless the star I see
rotating on the neural plane
by memory can be called again.
(It’s shining still inside of me.)
If eye and brain are not a star,
and neither is a memory,
then neither can the gleaming be.

—David Lohnes
July, 2014

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